If you’ve read The Game […] you can’t help being struck by how expensive all this must be, both in time and money. Mystery, the first PUA guru who kicked the whole “community” off by offering classes, charged something like $1-5000 for a week-long class — serious money back then, and that’s before you consider that guys were flying in from all over the country, indeed from all over the world, to take them. That aside, consider what it would take to hit at least three Sunset Strip clubs a night, three nights a week. I’m well past my bar-hopping days, but when I was in grad school, the “trendy” clubs in College Town charged $10-20 just in cover …
This was two decades or more ago, and College Town was in Podunkville. Imagine what they’re charging to get into the hot nightspots on the Sunset Strip. I bet just getting into the clubs costs these aspiring PUAs a couple hundred bucks, every week, for months. Then there’s all the other stuff Strauss said he did to transform himself into “Style” — laser-whitening his teeth, tanning beds, classes on elocution and posture, a whole new (and ever-changing) wardrobe, surfing. I can’t even begin to calculate it, but at one point he and three other PUAs are living in a Hollywood Hills mansion that once belonged to one of the Rat Pack — monthly rent, $50K. Then throw in the fact that all of this takes a tremendous amount of time, and consider the toll that must take on your body. I hit the sauce pretty hard back in my day, and one of the reasons I stopped was that the hangovers really started hurting — one night of bar-hopping now, and I’d be bedridden for days. I’m getting exhausted just typing this, and do you see what I mean?
And all this without getting a single girl. I think everyone here has been in at least one relationship, so we know that no matter how casual you keep it, bare-bones relationship management, even of pump-and-dumps, takes a fairish bit of time (so I’ve heard, anyway). I might be misremembering, but at one point Strauss claims he was managing something like four or five more or less long-term hookups simultaneously. I don’t think there are enough hours in the day …
Much better, then, to just say you’re a PUA. To do it Tyler Durden style, in other words. I’m pretty sure you could sell the illusion of yourself as a hardcore PUA with one not-too-expensive night on the town. Just dress up like one of these goobers, hit up one bar, and take selfies with a bunch of girls, making sure to alter the shot angles enough that no one can tell you’re in the same bar the whole time. Post one or two stories of your conquests a week, and you could portray yourself as some kind of pickup master in no time at all.
Of course, that’s if you want to consciously fake it. I have no idea what “Tyler Durden” was doing, not being a sociopath myself, but as Strauss tells it, his disciples got snookered into it. They really did want to learn how to pick up girls, but since dressing up like a PUA and talking about getting girls is much easier than actually getting girls, a night on the town with those guys ended up being an endless series of “approaches”. Again, it’s how you define “effective”, and Strauss lets the cat out of the bag a bit when he informs us of the PUA’s weird lingo for “closing”. There’s the “f-close”, of course, which should be obvious, but there’s also the “kiss close” and even the “phone number close” … and both of those count as complete successes.
Severian, “Mental Middlemen”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-05.
February 16, 2024
QotD: The PUA (Pick-up artist)
February 10, 2024
QotD: When Manchuria became Manchukuo
Further unpleasantness ensued in the wake of World War I, when both Imperial Russia and Republican China collapsed. The Japanese had a big railroad project of their own going in the Kwantung Leased Territory, which was threatened by the chaos. Moreover, the big Japanese railroad project had grown — as Japanese industrial concerns tend to do — into a ginormous, all-encompassing combine known as Mantetsu.
So far, so recondite, I suppose, but stop me if this part sounds familiar: Mantetsu was so big, and so shady, that it was all but impossible to tell where “the guys running Mantetsu” ended and “the Japanese government” began. And it gets better: Thanks to the Japanese Empire’s distinctive (to put it mildly, and kindly) administrative structure, it was equally hard to tell where “the Japanese government” ended and “the Japanese military” began. Even better — by which I mean much, much worse, but again feel free to stop me when this sounds familiar — “the Japanese military” was itself composed of several wildly different, mutually hostile chains of command, all competing with each other for political power, economic access, and glory. Best of all — by which, again, I mean worst — since Mantetsu was so big, and so wired-in to every level of the Japanese government, it basically got its own army, which was effectively separate even from the Army High Command back in Tokyo.
Here again, the granular details are insanely complex, and I’m not qualified to walk you through them, but the upshot is: Thanks to all of the above, plus the active enmity of the rapidly-rearming Soviet Union and the rapidly-accelerating chaos of the Warlord Period in China, Japan’s foreign policy ended up being dictated by the Kwantung Army, with almost no reference to even the High Command, let alone the civilian politicians, back in Tokyo. A particular warlord giving the Mantetsu Board of Directors — or, you know, whoever — grief? No problem — boom! Oh, that didn’t solve the problem, and now the politicians are dragging their feet? Might as well blow up a different part of your own railway, seize a whole bunch of territory on that flimsy pretext, and set up a puppet government to give you cover …
I don’t expect y’all to follow all the links right away, so trust me on this: Nobody involved in any of that stuff ranked higher than colonel. Indeed, the guy most “responsible” — if that’s really the word — for all of this stuff was a staff pogue, also a colonel, named Kanji Ishiwara. He and another staff pogue, Seishiro Itagaki, who was head of the Kwantung Army’s intelligence section, orchestrated the Japanese invasion of China, and while it’s oversimplifying things a bit too much to say those two clowns started World War II in the Pacific, I’m not stopping you from saying it.
From there, events took on a logic of their own. The rest of the Army was soon committed to the war in North China, which rapidly became the war in all the rest of China. The Navy, not wanting to let the Army hog all the glory, had gotten in on the war a few years prior to the Marco Polo Bridge, and soon enough they were causing all kinds of international grief on their own account. Put simply, but not unfairly, you had the Navy chasing the Army, and the Army chasing itself, all across China, with the civilian politicians lagging way behind in the rear, desperately trying to catch up, or even just figure out what the hell was going on …
Severian, “Lessons from Manchuria”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-04-21.
February 3, 2024
QotD: The Postmodernist’s Dilemma
We could also call it “the PoMo’s Dilemma”, since this stuff originated in the ivory tower back in the Sixties, and finally broke containment in the late Seventies. Most intellectual fads quickly become caricatures of themselves, but in their haste to get to the next hot new thing the PoMos decided to cut to the chase. Postmodernism started as a self-parody. Put simply but not at all unfairly, PoMo is the assertion for a fact that there is no such thing as a fact. There is no Truth, just “truth”. No eternal verities, just perspective, just discourse; it’s all — say it with me now — “just a social construction”.
I suppose we must give the early PoMos credit for having — in a thoroughly Postmodern way – the courage of their convictions. When Alan Sokal invited the PoMos to try transgressing the Law of Gravity from his twenty-first floor apartment window, the goofs from Social Text published a “rebuttal” to Sokal, informing him, a working physicist, that they, the English Department, understood physics better than he did. He meant it as a joke, but he was really right all along about the so-called “law” of “gravity”.
That was 1996. At that point, any sane society would’ve had the editors of Social Text dragged out of the faculty lounge and shot in the middle of the quad, pour encourager les autres. But of course we chose not to. And why would we? Being close to three decades deep into the Great Inversion by then, we got much barmier stuff than anything Social Text published in freshman orientation. Stick it to The Man, we were told, and don’t trust anyone over thirty …
Severian, “Hoist on Their Own Petard”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-04-19.
January 28, 2024
QotD: Never depend on “surveys” for real-world issues
The respondent pool is, overwhelmingly, college kids taking them for class credit. Knowing what we know about Basic College Girls, who again are the majority of all college kids, is it any surprise that the results just happen to confirm the conclusions the slightly older, but no less Basic, Grad Student Girls were looking for? Throw in the design problem — questions about as subtle as “Do you think all races should be treated equally, or are you a monster?” — and you’ve got scientific proof that Liberals are good people and Conservatives suck.
Severian, “Is vs. Ought II: Moral Foundations Theory”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-04-20.
January 24, 2024
QotD: Boomer hypocrisy
Severian, “Hoist on Their Own Petard”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-04-19.
January 20, 2024
QotD: 19th Century techno-optimism
They had a point, those intellectual Luddites. If you haven’t read up on the later 19th century in a while, it’s almost impossible to convey their boundless optimism, their total faith that “science” could, would, and should solve every conceivable problem. The best I can do is this: Back when they were still allowed to be funny, The Onion published a book called Our Dumb Century, which purported to be a collection of their front pages from every year of the 20th century. The headline for 1903 was something like: “Wright Brothers’ Flyer Goes Airborne for 30 Seconds! Conquest of Heaven Planned for 1910.”
That’s the late 19th century, y’all.
Severian, “Digital Infants”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-04-16.
January 15, 2024
QotD: Beyond mere superstition, moderns believe in literal magic
Magic dirt: There’s something about the Rio Grande, or the Ellis Island ferry, such that crossing it transforms 70-IQ campesinos into bourgie app developers. Magic shapes: Mold plastic into something that looks like a Glock, and anyone who sees it will be compelled to start shooting people. And of course the granddaddy of them all, magic words: Race, sex, these are all “social constructions”, such that a persyn who says xzhey are a woman really IS a woman, physiology be damned. Within the space of a generation, the same people who were smugly slapping Darwin fish on the bumpers of their Subaru Outbacks have declared the very basics of biology rank heresy.
Everyone knows that Karl Marx called religion “the opium of the masses”. It’s a fun quote, but it wasn’t particularly effective rhetoric back in the 19th century, since drug addiction wasn’t really a thing back then.1 Far more effective was David Hume’s description — “sick men’s dreams” — but even that paled in comparison to the 19th century’s go-to tactic: Implied infancy. If religious belief developed naturally, in a predictable pattern — and who could deny it, having read the formidable logic of E.B. Tylor? — then anyone who still clung to his belief in a Magic Sky Fairy must belong, despite his physical presence here in this best of all possible worlds, to Mankind’s intellectual infancy. Of course we’re not saying that the religion of Aquinas and Galileo, of Newton and Boyle, was all piffle … but come now, old sock, you must admit that the Thirty Nine Articles can only be understood “in a non-natural sense”, as Cardinal Newman (of all people!) put it. Are we not, in the face of all-triumphing science, all Robert Elsmere? Surely no one as obviously intelligent as yourself could possibly still …
Marx had that other quote that fits this situation much better, the one about “second time as farce”. Our Postmodern Elite, the I-Fucking-Love-Science crowd, has gone way past intellectual Luddism. They’re digital infants, chanting their hosannas to magic dirt, watching the same cartoon play out over and over again in Minnesota, in Chicago, soon enough in a neighborhood near you (infants love repetition). Tantrums, nom noms, and whee! A shiny!!
Such are the fruits of rationalism.
Severian, “Digital Infants”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-04-16.
1. Despite the easy availability of all kinds of highly addictive shit like opium and cocaine. Ponder that in the dark watches of the night, if you ever feel like giving yourself insomnia.
January 10, 2024
QotD: The root of leftism is envy
“Social justice” is sacralized envy.
Which fits a lot better on a Pepe the Frog meme, you must admit.
Note also the slight, but important, change in emphasis — from “hate” to “envy”. Recall that [Economics in One Lesson author Henry] Hazlitt was writing in 1946, when material deprivation was still a thing, even for Americans. Back then it was assumed that the hate sprang from the envy, which meant that the hatred could eventually be dissipated. It implied an endpoint. Hazlitt, like seemingly everyone else on the Right, took Lefties at their word — that some level of “equality”, by which they meant material prosperity, would cause the Left to finally hang up their jocks and hit the showers.
Three quarters of a century later, we know that’s not true. There’s nothing you could give them that would ever satisfy them. Go ahead, do it Jesus-style — turn the other cheek, give them your coat and your cloak, walk with them two miles, all that jazz. You know as well as I do what will happen — they’ll still hate you. It doesn’t matter what the “reasons” are. Before, they hated you because they didn’t have a coat and cloak. Now they’ve got yours, but they still hate you, because you’re right-handed, or blonde, or have webbed toes. Or because you don’t have webbed toes.
Whatever, something, anything. I won’t bother repeating the O’Brien quote from 1984; you’ve heard it enough by now to know what I mean when I say that for the Left, the point of envy is envy. They don’t envy you for what you have. They don’t even envy you for what you are. They just envy. The mere fact that you exist, a separate entity from them, means that they’re not all there is in the world. In other words — French judges, take note — we’re down to three words:
Leftism is solipsism.
They envy your mere existence, since you are the walking, talking proof that not everything in this world is as shriveled and petty and miserable as they are.
Severian, “Crossing the Bar”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-04-06.
January 6, 2024
QotD: “Computer people are just people”
Severian, “For Future Historians’ Benefit…”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-02-21.
January 2, 2024
QotD: Cigarette smuggling and the powers-that-be
At that point, the Powers That Be were in trouble. Butt-smuggling was cutting into their projected tax revenues — tax revenues which, being governments, they’d already spent several years in advance. That’s bad.
Much worse, though, was the realization that, the more people bought their smokes off the back of a truck in Weehawken, the more those people realized that 99% of law “enforcement” is really “convincing people to voluntarily comply with the law”. As they should’ve realized from Prohibition back in the Twenties, and would soon have the opportunity to learn again with the War on Drugs, 1980-present, lifestyle laws are effectively unenforceable. Not even the most draconian techno-fascists, armed with 100% realtime surveillance, can stop people from getting high off something.
And that’s the worst knock-on effect of all, because the attempt turns “getting high” into a rebellious little thrill. You’re not just getting drunk / burning one down / smoking a Mob-supplied cigarette, you’re sticking it to The Man. If you don’t believe me, watch what happens to pot consumption in college towns once it’s fully legalized. Hint: It’s the same thing that happens to college kids’ alcohol consumption after they turn 21 — now that the cheap little thrill of being the rebel with the fake ID is gone, drinking loses a lot of its charm. Similarly, 99% of the “legalize it!” crowd’s “arguments” are just virtue signaling — they’re letting you know what rebels they are by breaking the pot laws. If you really want to cut down the consumption of intoxicants in a college town, at least, simply legalize ’em all. Your few true addicts will provide a spectacular lesson in Darwinism to the student body, but the vast majority of kids will be all but straight-edge.
Severian, “The Mob, Faux-tism, and the Ever-Rising Costs of Compliance”, Founding Questions, 2021-02-02.
December 17, 2023
QotD: When “factions” coalesce into “parties”
Geographic expansion keeps that in check, the Federalist guys thought, because clever, ambitious men who feel themselves blocked by the Old Boys’ Network can always head west, to try their luck in one of the burgeoning frontier communities. Which worked — that’s the part the Federalist guys got right — but enough clever, ambitious men stayed back East that “factions” transformed into something much worse: Actual political parties.
Severian, “Real Federalism Has Never Been Tried”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-03.
December 12, 2023
QotD: “Natural hierarchies” don’t work in distributed systems
Politics, being a distributed system, doesn’t work like that. Neither does the corporate world, which is why both invariably end up dominated by sociopathic, sexually deviant shitweasels. Whereas the social interaction in a bar, in a pickup basketball game, in a church group, whatever, naturally bends towards a baboon troop, “social” interaction in a distributed power structure bends towards whoever has the time, energy, and sheer Wille zur Macht, as our friend above would put it, to dominate it.
Example: Even at the height of his power, when he really could have liquidated everyone in the room with a wave of his hand, Joe Stalin didn’t win arguments with his nomenklatura by threatening to have them all shot. Rather, he outworked them. Even when he exercised the most raw power any one human being is capable of wielding, Stalin’s work ethic was legendary – he spent a minimum of fifteen hours a day at his desk, every day, 365 days a year. He simply ground down all lesser men with the sheer force of his leather ass and cast-iron bladder … and compared to Stalin, when it came to paperwork, all men were lesser men.
That’s a cast of mind, reinforced by the habits of a lifetime. Stalin was also a dominant personality by the end, of course, but he certainly didn’t start that way – he was cringingly servile to Lenin, for instance, and even once to Trotsky, which is probably the main reason Trotsky had to die when you come right down to it.
Hitler was the same way, in his own special, bizarre way. While no one would ever accuse Hitler of an overactive work ethic when it comes to government – those who study these things still can’t get their heads around it, the fact that for long, critical periods the Third Reich basically didn’t have a government – but he could wear you down with the best of them when it came to party speeches, organizing, propaganda. No one worked harder at that stuff than Corporal Hitler … and no one knuckled under to authority faster, which is why he remained Corporal Hitler despite four years on the Western Front.
Combine them, and you get the Big Man On Campus thoroughly dominated by the deviant sociopathic shitweasels. The BMOC dominates every personal interaction; therefore, he thinks it’s the rules which get him where he is. Society is set up, he thinks, to produce people such as himself. And since that society is also set up such that the deviant sociopathic shitweasels (we should probably acronymize that; hereafter, DSS) do the boring shit like student government, when the DSS pass some bizarre law the BMOC just rolls with it …
Severian, “Bio-Marxism Grab Bag”, Founding Questions, 2021-01-21.
December 8, 2023
QotD: Prices as information
Let’s all take another huge toke and return to our Libertarian paradise, where all conceivable information is both completely accurate and totally free to circulate. And since we’re now all so very, very mellow, let’s give Karl Marx due credit. One of his main gripes with “capitalism” is that it “commodifies” everything. Everything has its price under “capitalism”, Marx said, even stuff that shouldn’t – human life, human dignity. Since this is a college classroom and I’m the prof, I can assign some homework. Go google up “kid killed over sneakers”. You can always find stories like that. Put your natural, in-many-ways-admirable young person’s urge to rationalize aside, and simply consider the information. What were those Air Jordans really worth, based on the stuff we’ve learned today?
See what I mean? Marx had a point. What are those sneakers worth, considered from the standpoint of “demand”? Obviously more than whatever a human life is worth, considered from the same standpoint. Hence Marxism’s enduring appeal to young people whose hearts are in the right place. “Commodificiation”, or “reification” as he sometimes called it, is very real, and very nasty …
Severian, “Velocity of Information (I)”, Founding Questions, 2020-12-26.
December 4, 2023
QotD: The “ivory gulag”
So, too, with their mentalities. I spent many years toiling in the groves of academe, so obviously my social life (such as it was) contained a lot of post-menopausal lesbians. No creature is more solipsistic than this. Whatever maternal instincts she once might’ve had, have curdled into general naggy truculence, and since they have all the money and free time in the world in which to indulge their narcissism, if they can’t find any actual wrongthink around they’ll simply invent some. Before the Deplorables were driven to organize themselves for gaudy, suicidal, IRA-style violence, post-Oranzhevvy Trashcanistan felt, I imagine, a lot like a college campus …
… which the few people with normal serum hormone levels who were stuck there often called “the ivory gulag”. Make of that what you will.
Severian, “Hormones, or Lack Thereof”, Founding Questions, 2021-01-20.
November 30, 2023
QotD: “Information velocity” in the English Civil War
Some of the battles of the Wars of the Roses were bigger than some of the Civil War’s battles – an estimated 50,000 men fought at Towton, in 1461 – but the Civil War was inconceivably harder and nastier than the Wars of the Roses, because the Civil War was an ideological war. The Wars of the Roses could’ve ended, at least theoretically, at any time – get the king and five dukes in a room, hammer out a compromise, and simply order everyone in each lord’s affinity to lay down his weapons. The Civil War could only end when everyone, in every army, was persuaded to lay down his arms.
Thus the winners had to negotiate with the people, directly. The Putney Debates didn’t involve everyone in the realm, but they were representative, truly representative, of everyone who mattered. Though no one explicitly made an appeal to competence alone, it was – and is, and must be – fundamental to representative government. Guys like Gerrard Winstanley had some interesting ideas, but they were fundamentally impractical, and Winstanley was not popularly viewed as a competent leader. Oliver Cromwell, on the other hand, was competence personified – the Protectorate became Cromwell’s military dictatorship largely because the People, as literally represented by the New Model Army, wanted it so … and, thanks to much faster information velocity, could make their wishes known.
Severian, “Inertia and Incompetence”, Founding Questions, 2020-12-25.
